The present invention relates to devices usable as an actuator or a motor which are simple to form, which use low-cost fuel, and which emit little or no waste.
Further, the present invention relates to devices usable as an actuator or a motor capable of operating inside of a biological medium such as the human body or an animal body.
Such actuators or such motors find applications in the medical field, for example, to palliate the deficiency of a natural muscle. The muscles that can be replaced or assisted, temporarily or definitively, are, for example, the heart muscle, the respiratory muscles, the sphincter, and non-striated or striated muscles, in particular, skeletal muscles.
Such actuators and such motors also find applications in fields other than the medical field. In particular, such a motor may be used in all the fields where a small waste generation is an important factor in the motor selection. It may be, for example, the automobile field where the polluting waste generated by the motor used to drive the vehicle wheels is desired to be reduced as much as possible.
Still unpublished French patent application FR0109526 assigned to the applicant describes an osmotic actuator intended to be plunged into a biological medium and comprising a deformable enclosure having a semi-permeable membrane, said enclosure containing an osmotically active solute.